Hello. I've recently recorded some footage with my Canon T2i with a resolution of 1920x1080. I've taken all the footage (In .MOV format) and put them together to make a dvd in Encore CS5.5. I had to make my own menu, buttons, highlights and everything for it and im really happy with what i've done. I've been reading up on this and i have discovered that i will be unable to project the dvd in HD quality on a standard DVD-R. I've worked really hard on this video, as it is something that i am to be showing at an imporant event and i want to achieve the maxiumum quality i can. I don't have a Blu-Ray burner at all, so the hopes of Blu-Ray are pointless.

I was in a little film program for a few months in highschool, and when it came to our final DVD's, we were told to export them as MPEG-2 DVD's. Does this make a difference if i have them in .MOV or MPEG-2 DVD format? If anyone has any tips that could help, i would greatly appreciate it.

The reason this is so imporant to me, is that i recorded a recent recital at school, and many of the parents wanted DVD's of it. I took down names and how many DVD's each parent wanted and im around 150 dvd's. They were going to be $5 each and the profits would go to the school's film program. I don't want parents buying DVD's and seeing them in poor 480p quality.

You can put Bluray on a DVD-R, but it must be played back on a bluray player. Only about 20 minutes. Your content is almost certainly too long. Doing this well requires shooting with the goal of DVD (and Bluray) delivery in mind.

Best DVD results, in an age of HD TVs, requires a decent upscaling player. Experiment with a couple short sections.

From a post on cow:

My comment:

Use an Encore Bluray project. Build to a bluray image so the size will fit on a DVD. My recollection is the same as Ricky's - about 20 minutes at whatever the rate was! I use imgburn to burn the BD image onto a DVD. A BD player will play the DVD as a BD. I have heard that some players will not handle this, and I have tested it on only one player.

And same thread from Patrick Simpson:

Very interesting. According the FCP article, the burned DVD has an "average bit rate of 14.7 Mbps and a max bit rate of 17 Mbps" due to the limitations of the DVD's red laser. I'm guessing I'd have to limit the data rate with Encore as well.

If you do need a DVD-Video, the best will be to play it on either a BD, or DVD player, with up-rezzing capabilities. They have dedicated chips that will enhance that DVD-Video to the best that it can ever be - not HD, but better than straight DVD to TV.

We all get spoiled by viewing the HD footage we shoot, but DVDs can look very good on an HD screen. As mentioned, the trick is to use an upconverting playing, which will have an HDMI output. DO NOT use the yellow RCA composite out from a DVD player to HD screen, that will look nasty!

I create a LOT of DVDs from HD footage and they all look excellent on my 50" 720p display coming from a Blu-ray player, though any upconverting DVD player ought to provide similar results. I often think I'm watching HD footage and have to remind myself that it is standard definition on the DVD.

You can use Dynamic Link from Premiere to Encore, but myself and it seems a majority of users here like to have some more manual control and will use Export from Premiere using Adobe Media Encoder. Choose "MPEG-2 DVD" format and an appropriate preset for your needs. Besides that, you may need to change the data rate depending on program length to be sure the exported file is not too big for the DVD. The assets you encode can then be Imported into Encore. No sense encoding to .mov or anything else, as Encore will need to transcode to MPEG-2 DVD anyway, just adding more layers of compresssion and time lost if you use some other intermediate format.

On another note regarding your 150 "orders" - it sounds like you have not collected any money yet. People will often "sign up" for things, but will not follow through later. Best to collect the money with order forms up front. If you burn 150 copies, you could end up stuck with half of them unsold. Also, you are certainly free to charge whatever you want, but $5 is a bit light after expenses of DVD media, case, ink for printing DVD and insert, etc. I understand you are not doing this for profit, but rather to raise some funds for film club, but don't sell yourself short ;-)

So very true, and as mentioned, a DVD-Video, played from a deck w/ a good up-rezzing chip, through HDMI, can look very, very good.

I have recently re-visited some of my old DVD-Videos, with some of my BD decks, hooked to 48" to 60" HD TV's, and have been amazed at how good they look - not BD, obviously, but better than I would ever have imagined - far better than when played from older DVD decks to some pretty good CRT TV's, from when I first created them.

Thanks for the additional info, like the connection cable. I had not mentioned that, and it can be very important.